Faiz was acknowledged long ago
as the greatest Urdu poet after Iqbal. Even those who were critical of his
progressive social and political beliefs could not deny him that position,
although they always qualified their praise of him by regretting that such a
good man should have fallen among the Communists.
He was a keen student of various traditions of classical poetry in Urdu,
Punjabi, Hindi, Arabic, Persian, and English among others and had realized at an
early age that it was the content and not the form which was basic in the art of
poetry, that originality had little to do with formal experimentation and was
primarily a matter of a profound understanding of human existence in its
totality and wholeness.
His Critical essays, written mostly during his formative years, are a testimony
to the fact that he had arrived at, and formulated clearly the essential
elements of the poetics necessary for our age, the age of the masses.
Iqbal had sung poems of glory to the fact of revolution and given out a clarion
call to the people to rise up against the master-classes and tyrants. Faiz,
having joined the people in their rebellion, and having adopted the collective
cause as a poet of the revolution, made the transformation of the individual
human being and his passage through the infinite variety of situations and moods
in this process, the subject of his poetry. He is concerned, above all, with the
experience of the individual human soul in the long and arduous journey of
revolutionary struggle.
And yet love is the leit motif of his poetry. Faiz is one of the great lyricists
who seems, from one point of view, to have sung of nothing with greater passion
than love.
Faiz takes Ghalib's plea for a deeply philosophical coordination of the poetic
profession as his premise to refute the arguments of the aesthetes of his time
for whom poetry was merely peripheral activity. But he goes further and comments
that Ghalib's definition of creative vision is incomplete, because the poet is
not only required to see the ocean in the drop, but also has to show it to
others.
That is why, apart from being a great revolutionary poet, he was a great love
poet, and there was no distinction between the two, love and revolution had
become identical in him.
AWARDS OF FAIZ
The real award for a poet is the love and appreciation of his fans. Faiz stands
among those who enjoy both at one and the same time. Besides he was awarded the
Lenin Peace Prize in 1963, as the first Asian poet. Before his death in 1984 he
was also a nominee for the award of Nobel Prize, but his association in later
life, with Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Movement, and the Editorship of
Lotus, deprived him of the award because the Zionist element in the controlling
body of the Nobel Prize is strong.
Books written By Faiz
Naqshe Faryadi, 1941
• Daste Saba, 1953
• Zindan Nama, 1956
• Mizan, a collection of literary articles,1956
• Daste-Tahe-Sang, 1965
• Sare-Wadiye Seena, 1971
• Shame-Shehr Yaran, 1979
• Merey Dil Merey Musafar, 1981
• Nuskha-Hai-Wafa, 1984
• Pakistani Culture, Urdu & English
FAIZ AND ME
I have posted two articles about faiz this would be the second one i strongly
recommend you to read faiz poetry with its meaning and context i asure you that
you would start loving him this will also impact your personality with way of
thinking but before you enter this paradise you have some basic knowledge about
faiz, his writtings, how he thought, what are the emotional storms under which
he has created his poems alowely you will enter his castle of love and start
loving him. To me faiz is not a poet when i feel dipress when i fail to do some
thing which i want to be strongly done in my life and when some one herts me
faiz poems give me sport.
Thanks